Category Archives

I solved the final problem with getting the Title Tag to show what I want. I had to add an override of wp_title in the same plugin that I wrote to handle the variables. I got hung up for awhile trying to get it to work and eventually figured out that I needed to turn off “Use Bytes for All SEO options” in “Configure SEO” in the “Atahualpa Theme Options”. Works quite nicely now.
Now I can get back to editing my pages after taking a week long diversion to deal with tables that weren’t working the way I wanted 🙂

Okay, the challenge of moving the Product pages to be within WordPress in the new theme was too tempting to pass up on, and after a couple of days of experimenting and some help from the “Atahualpa” forums I’ve got it working. I didn’t need to define a new template page or anything. It did however change all of the page addresses, as I suspected it would.
I’ve managed to implement this new method while leaving the old method available so any links that I haven’t updated yet, or from outside pages will still pull up valid Product Pages. Best of both worlds 🙂
One problem I still have to solve is that under the old method I could change the Title Tag, which is what shows up in the tab in browsers. With the new method it stays as the generic “Product_Page << ICEWEBRING" instead of getting changed to the Product Name.
I've posted it as a question on the forums, hopefully someone has a solution that doesn't involve manually editing the header.php file in the theme, which seems to be the best solution I could find using Google.

I’ve switched the WordPress theme that I’m using from “F2” to “Atahualpa”. “F2” worked well except it wouldn’t handle wide tables properly, instead of compressing the sides and wrapping the text within the cells, it would simply chop off the right hand side of the table.

The “Athahualpa” theme handles the wide tables well, although I’m having trouble getting some smaller tables to center in a some of the posts, and it handles the custom php trickery that I’m doing to get my product pages to display. I do lose the right hand sidebar on those, when I try and add it I just get a text version of the sidebar contents above the entry for the product, but it’s not a big deal to have it missing on those pages.
“Athahualpa” is also highly customizable, I’ve barely scratched the surface with what can be done with it.
This is still all part of my project to get rid of as many of the php, pdf, and other document pages as possible and get them all converted into regular WordPress pages.
The other advantage is that “Athahualpa” doesn’t have a maximum width which “F2” does.

In theory, I think there are ways that I could change the Product pages from being a call with a parameter from a WordPress page to an outside PHP page that tries to pull in the WordPress headers and sidebars to some sort of WordPress Template page that could accept the parameter and pull the information from my product database while staying within WordPress. Most of the solutions I’ve seen so far look like they would be a lot of work to get going, and would likely change all of my page addresses(again). Someday I will attempt it, but I have lots of other things to fix up first.

As part of the clean up of this site, I’ve redone my “The Evolution of Arms Law” as a regular WordPress page and added a couple of updates to it.
I still want to expand the new section on the Rolemaster Classic version, and I want to do some additional clarifications around the various First Edition printings, unfortunately I am temporarily without access to my books so some of that will need to wait until my basement rebuild is complete and the books come out of storage.

I’ve gone through all the sites that currently belong to the ICE Webring and to the MERP Webring and have created links here to all of the ones that still have any sort of relevant content.

At the peak of the Webrings I had over 150 sites between the two rings, now I’m down to about 25. Many were lost when GeoCities shut down and many others have slowly disappeared over the years with very few new additions. Many of the remaining 25 sites haven’t been updated in years and I suspect many of them will disappear completely over the next couple of years.

This is the first step in decommissioning those rings. I’ve felt for awhile that the Webring technology doesn’t really serve a purpose anymore, with Google and other search engines being so good these days.

Adding to this the increased amount of advertising on the Webring site itself, with poorer support and navigation, I feel it is time to move on.

This site will remain much as it was, the “How to Join” pages for the Ice Webring and MERP Webring will get converted to a list of links with an option to add additional sites and I will continue to update and clean up the existing content and perhaps even get ambitious enough to add some new content.

The fourth issue of The Guild Adventurer has arrived! The Guild Adventurer is a compilation of original adventures and adventure-related material for Rolemaster, Shadow World and HARP. In this, the fourth issue, we have five adventures:

Who Saves the Savior – a high-level scenario by Robert Defendi for the Echoes of Heaven setting, statted for Rolemaster and HARP.

Unusual Heroes – this low-level scenario by Dennis Larsen pits ordinary folk who might aspire to become adventurers against the braggadacio of experienced sellswords; it is statted for Rolemaster and HARP

Muck and Mire – this standalone scenario by Marc Rosen statted for HARP and Rolemaster will give your PCs an opportunity to get their hands dirty and their feet wet;

Keep of the Damned – this standalone scenario by Ward Miller will satisfy the needs of your HARP and Rolemaster players for a dungeon crawl and general smiting of the Undead.

Eyes of Stone – Terry Amthor reveals some of the mysteries and magic of southeast Emer in this Rolemaster (Classic and RMSS/FRP) adventure for the Shadow World setting.

In addition to having links to purchase used products from Noble Knight, I’ve now created an Amazon Affiliate account for myself and have started adding purchase links to Amazon. I’m about halfway through the First Edition MERP products right now.

I also realized that I’m missing a bunch of French translation products, so I’ll have to track those down and get them added to the database as well.

I think I’ve now added all the products that I had been missing, including the Fantasy Grounds packages for Rolemaster Classic.
Still need to do some work on the Related Products portion and add some links for purchasing used products on Amazon.
I think there are also a couple thumbnails and cover images that I’m still missing as well, but overall I’m pretty happy with the progress that has been made.

Added in the newest version of “Cloudlords of Tanara”, added in the rest of the “Electronic Rolemaster Assistant” software.
Did some tweaking to the “Related Products”, allowing for multiple categories of relationships.
Still need to add in some missing “AutoHARP” software, and the “Rolemaster Combat Minion” software.
Then I’ll go through the recent entries on RPGNow and see if there is anything else I missed. Most likely to have missed versions of items that can now be ordered as physical books instead of just pdfs.

I’ve now gone through and updated all the links in the RMSS vs RMFRP pages, and added in some formatting that seemed to have gotten lost somewhere along the way.
Also added in Terry Amthor’s novel “The Loremaster Legacy” and some of the ERA Software packages to the list of products. Still need to add in additional ERA packages

I also deleted most of the old php files for individual products. Some of them had been updated with redirects at one point, but those no longer match the new database structure so I got rid of them. Hopefully I found all the links in my pages that used to use them, some of the really old posts probably point to them but I’m not too concerned about them. I’ll keep an eye on my stats for 404 errors for the next while and fix up anything I may have missed. The Translations are still using those pages, I still need to get them done up properly into the database.